Gone Girl (2014)

Gone Girl

★ ★ ★ 1/2 out of 5

Directed by David Fincher

Starring Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne

Rosamund Pike as Amy Elliot Dunne

Imdb Link

On Nick and Amy’s five year anniversary, Amy goes missing, which leads to a media circus, and a witch hunt in which Nick becomes the target. Now the question is, did Nick Dunne really kill his wife?

Out of this whole year, Gone Girl was my second most anticipated film, only behind Interstellar, and unfortunately it disappointed me a little bit. That’s not to say it’s a bad movie, it’s a very good one, but it’s nothing in comparison to Fincher’s other big works like Se7en or The Social Network. I’ll get to why I was disappointed in a little bit, but for now, I want to go over the positives about this movie, because there were a lot of amazing things about it. Speaking of amazing, holy shit Amy. Rosamund Pike’s performance as Amy Elliot Dunne is probably the best performance I’ve seen all year so far. She blew me away. I knew she would be good, but I never expected to be so torn apart by a character who I really loved to hate. Amy is one of the most evil characters I think I’ve ever seen, and probably the most interesting character of the year. Then of course Ben Affleck killed it, maybe not as much as his on-screen wife, but he did an excellent job with his part, and most surprisingly, Tyler Perry was really good. Next, the score was perfection. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s Gone Girl score might be their best work. It’s really tense, and helps get your heart racing in some of the more gruesome scenes. Speaking of gruesome scenes, each bit of violence in this film was utterly damaging. There was one scene in particular, as well as it’s aftermath (if you’ve seen Gone Girl, you know what I mean) that made my jaw drop, and just hang there for the rest of the film. Then, finally, the story was full of deliciously satisfying twists and turns, and even though I had the first twist spoiled for me, I never knew what would come next.  Now onto the disappointments, my main one goes out to Neil Patrick Harris, who I thought would really get to show his stuff here, but he’s just a very bland character in this. Not entirely Harris’s fault, but he didn’t do much with his performance. The next disappointment was just in the overall pace of the movie, which was not a scripting issue, but an editing problem. Maybe it was meant to be this way, but every cut felt about half a second too early. We hardly have any room to breath, and each shot cuts away just a little bit before it would be most effective. This all started in the opening credits, when names would show up, and be gone before you knew it. That may have been the point, and a very intentional editing choice, but in my opinion, it wasn’t an effective one, and actually made the movie a lot less enjoyable. So overall, Gone Girl may not have been everything I wanted, but it did give me Rosamund Pike’s psychopathic performance, and the best score of the year thus far. It’s a decent film, but in my opinion, it doesn’t live up to the hype.